Hey everyone. Because it has been a little while since an update was given on script development, I decided it might be nice to announce some things to come.

One point of focus for this update is performance. Changes will be made to, vehicle placement and map streaming. Keeping people with lower end systems in mind, a solution will be applied to areas crowded with vehicles. Issues will mostly arise around the dealership/LSPD area since these are next to each other and are crowded with vehicles. The maps will be separated even more than they already were internally, so that we can make sure objects are streamed more efficiently than they currently do. This should also take care of vehicles falling through custom mapping when they are streamed in earlier than the objects they're on.

At least three new activities will be introduced in this update job-wise. These are: arms dealing, drugs dealing and scrapping cars. They won't be created like 'official jobs', meaning that you don't have to join them like regular jobs. These activities have their own cooldowns in one way or another. For example, you can sell drugs to people as long as you have them. Growing weed takes one playing hour to complete, and will yield x grams of weed for you to use. Whether you give it to people for free, for a fee or use it yourself. It's your product, your choice. With the systems this way, the waiting period for the product to grow or be created is in a sense the cooldown for the activity.
Other small activities like rummaging through garbage and fishing will be introduced to give you more to do.

The solution for areas cluttered with cars, also allows for more lone vehicles to be placed around the playing area, without being too much of a performance issue. These cars will be in a locked state and can be broken into and hotwired. These cars can be scrapped at at the modshop. This will invoke a cooldown on scrapping cars however.

The job system will also be changed a little. Right now you can perform activities for a job 4 times per hour. The cooldown starts from the moment you perform the activity for the first time. If it takes you 15 minutes to perform these activities 4 times, that means you'll have to wait out the cooldown for another 45 minutes. I can understand this can be a pain to wait out, especially when the server is empty. The amount of times you can perform job activities will be increased, while keeping total payout per payday the same. While this means that payout per performed activity decreases, it will give you chance to improve your skill level for that job faster, and allows you to play the job more often instead of just waiting around until you can finally do it again.

In combination with the new arms and drugs dealer activities, a house upgrade system will be added. This will allow you to add a basement to your house which can also be upgraded to give you even more basement space. This should be perfect for people who want to pursue a fruitful arms/drugs production career.

New factions might also be added in this update, but I'll leave that aside for now.

With the new SA-MP 0.3.8 being in RC phase now, I'm considering the possibilities with its new functions. When it's stable I'll be looking into adding custom models for certain objects (most recent example, for the weed growth unit). Maybe some female skins for professions like firefighter that don't have female skins by default. The use of this new possibility will be handled with care however. We won't add any models that don't fit in the GTA:SA universe or files that are too large. Especially for people that have limited bandwidth, low end PC's or slow internet, this will be important.

I feel this post is getting really big already, so for now I'll keep it at this. A lot more smaller features and fixes will be included in this update as well, these will all be listed in the changelog when the update is done. Guides will also be posted on how to use some of the new systems.
Please keep in mind that features are subject to change.